Thursday Poetry Post: Grief as a Thing I Keep Giving Away

Everybody smiles forgiveness,/except the ones who have an answer.

Hello, happy Thursday! It’s a gorgeous sunny spring day which means I am coming to you with a reeeeeaaaal downer of a poem. It’s one of my own, though, and I’m going to be writing about how I wrote and edited it.

After my Gram Cracker died in early 2021, I really couldn’t stop myself from writing about it. A lot of things, most of which were never seen by anyone but me. But some of my writing turned into poems. And some of those poems were published.

Loss was not new to me when my Gram died, but grief was. It didn’t necessarily feel like a burden – I mean, some days, yes, it did – it just felt like excess. Like I had gotten too good at couponing and now I had a stockpile of shaving cream taking up the spare room. Like I had won a sweepstakes contest, an enormous supply of something I didn’t really want and could never use up. Grief is a lifetime supply of emotions with nowhere to put them. I don’t even have a garage.